Moving video may be encoded in a number of threads, with each thread containing coded video from different frames of video data. The threads are recombined at a receiving terminal as a single video stream. Video encoded in this manner is more error resilient, and may, for example, transmit at a reduced frame rate when errors occur in one of the threads. An exemplary multi-threaded video coding/decoding system is described in U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/389,170, entitled “An Error Recovery Method for Video Compression Coding using Multiple Reference Buffers and a Message Channel,” the teachings of which are incorporated herein by reference.
As a significant disadvantage, multi-threaded video may exhibit visual artifacts. For example, different threads are not typically referenced to each other, and as a result, regions of an image, such as the image background, may drift so that the background for one thread is offset from the background for another thread. Even slight offsets of this type may cause visually noticeable jitter in a recombined video stream. There remains a need for a video coding scheme that reduces visual artifacts associated with multi-threaded video.